2-WWII Poland OT

Problems To Be Addressed: Home Fronts

• How may the Home Front’s awareness of the war’s objectives and nature be characterized? How did propaganda

• affect the mindset at home? Prior to the war even starting, the Nazis had begun their policies of controlling the Polish populations once they had actually taken control of the country. Prewar Poland had a Jewish population of 3.4 million and accounted for half the population in the capital

• of Warsaw and this population caused for hateful policies to be enacted by the Germans once they were occupied. The Nazis initiated operation Tannenberg, which created a list of over 60,000 polish intellectuals, actors, activists, scholars, an

• d other people the Nazis deemed a threat to the occupation to be rounded up to be imprisoned or shot. The Nazi propaganda of trying to capture every single Jew was slowly becoming more and more realistic, due to the policies and hate crimes being done.

• What were the direct contributions of the Home Front to the war effort? This needs to go beyond a cursory statement of, “They supplied soldiers, grew food, made armaments, etc.” You should consider support not only in patriotic or industrial terms, but also political, social, economic, cultural/intellectual, moral/religious, emotional, etc., terms After Poland was taken over by the Nazis in September of 1939, policies dealing with the segregation of the Jewish population in many large cities into poor living conditions, most notably in the Jewish Ghettos in Warsaw were put in place immediately. Many Jews either lived in the Ghettos or had to hide out in their attic. This made many individuals paranoid that the Nazis will come at any time to capture them. It also made young children doubt the Jewish religion and all the values which their parents had placed on them. Though the Jewish population was targeted to the highest degree Heinrich Himmler, head of the SS, deemed it necessary to divide up all the different groups in Poland in order to make room for the “living space” of ethnic German people, and to quell any forms of resistance therefore keeping the German Occupation in power. However this did not stop the resistance, Poland actually had the largest resistance movement out of any occupied country during the war.

• What were the costs & benefits of the war to the Home Front, to include but not limited to goods/services/resources? Use a case study to illustrate. The general results of the occupation were that quite a large number of German soldiers were taken from the fighting army to stay and act as guard personnel, about 10,000 troops were stationed all throughout the country. The occupation also had devastating effects on the populations of Poland especially the minority populations like the Jewish. With mass deportations of civilians from Poland and segregation of specific populations the psychological stability of the populations of Poland was extremely unsteady which caused for large splinter groups to be created resulting in large resistance movements in Poland. The occupations of Poland at first drastically lowered the moral of the civilians but once the resistance movements began the moral rose back up. Throughout the occupation of the Poland the civilians and Germans did not get along very well due to the harsh treatments of the civilians of the German soldiers. This feeling was mutual for the Germans who felt that the non-German populations in Poland were beneath them and not worth the same as a German.

• How can life for women & youth on the Home Front be characterized? Use case studies to illustrate. Throughout the occupation of Poland the Germans began kidnapping children that they believed to look and act German. They would take them from their parents and put them through psychological, and racial tests in order to see if the child was “German” enough. If the child passed he went to Germany was taught in a Nazi sponsored school which educated the new "German" in the Nazi culture as well as to instill extreme German patriotism and make the child forget their old home.This affected the children who were indoctrinated into this program and scarred them for the rest of their lives. The Germans were extremely harsh to the Polish and other cultural groups in the country, especially the women, their violent acts of terror were one of the reasons that the resistance movements in Poland were the largest in the world.

Problems To Be Addressed: Occupied Territories

• What were the circumstances in the Occupied Territory that compelled the policies implemented by the occupying power there? How was policy shaped to address these circumstances? The German program for Polish Jews was one of concentration, isolation, and eventually, annihilation. Initially they forced the Polish Jews from the annexed territories and from all rural and smaller urban areas into large, overcrowded urban centers. Now in large concentrations, they isolated them from Polish society into sealed ghettos, where they had to endure appalling living conditions. Governing each ghetto was the Nazi-mandated Jewish Council whose members were former Jewish community leaders. While aspiring to alleviate the tremendous suffering of ghetto inhabitants, they actually played into the hands of the Nazis, making their job of annihilation easier. Eventually the German authorities deported the debilitated ghetto populations to concentration camps specifically built to kill people on an unprecedented scale.

• What were the effects of the occupation of your territory on the occupying power's war effort? The racist policies of the Third Reich against Slavs and other "undesirables" filled the labor and concentration camps from the first days of occupation. The deliberate maltreatment, starvation, overwork and executions of prisoners amounted to ethnic cleansing. Between 1941–1942, the concerted effort to destroy the Polish Jews including those of other European nationalities led to the creation of death camps, constructed for the sole purpose of extermination. It was only after the majority of Jews from all Polish ghettos were annihilated that the gas chambers and crematoria were blown up in a systematic attempt to hide the evidence of the crimes.

• What were the motivations/methods/outcomes of resistance and collaboration? How did this affect the Occupied Territory after the war? Use case studies to illustrate. The methods of resistance included direct fighting which included direct combat with German soldiers as well as non- direct combat including gaining the trust of the German soldiers in order to gain information to send to British intelligence. The resistance movement in Poland was the largest underground resistance in all of Europe at the time with estimates of over 300,000 people involved in resistance actions. There was not much trust in having allies, because it was considered every man (country) for himself. The motivations of the resistance movements in Poland were attributed to how the Germans treated the populations of non-German people which was terribly. This also meant that there was little collaboration and the little collaboration that did occur only dealt with befriending guards to help them get supplies needed in order to survive. This resistance lasted from 1939 when Poland was first taken over to the end of the war in 1945, resulting in many deaths on both sides.

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